Image via Bill Summers/Instagram
You can find Jack Riedy’s upcoming DJ sets on his Instagram.
It’s hard to avoid hyperbole with Head Hunters, Herbie Hancock’s 1973 jazz-rock Frankenstein’s monster whose riffs have become universal without draining the original four track LP of its power over five decades after its release. UC Berkeley-trained percussionist Bill Summers was a key part of Hancock’s new fusion ensemble, most evident in the head-expanding collage of handclaps, falsetto vocals, penny whistle, shekere, and beer bottles that opens “Watermelon Man.” Though without songwriting credit, he did not receive any revenue from the dozens of times his part has been sampled.
Summers played with Hancock for several years in the ’70s, then became bandleader of the Headhunters when they split off as their own group and released seven albums between 1975 and 2022. Along the way, Summers studied ancient rhythms of ceremonial music as part of African fraternity Anya and lent his Afro-Cuban percussion style to Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder, Patrice Rushen, and many more.
I went out on a cold wet weeknight in January to see the Headhunters promoting last fall’s album The Stunt Man at SPACE in Evanston, where the 250-seat room was filled to capacity with still-hip boomers clutching wine glasses and CBD colas. Perhaps due to our proximity to Northwestern University, the audience had an academic vibe as we grooved in our seats and chuckled at the band’s banter. Only Summers and drummer Mike Clark remain of the original lineup; Clark reflected warmly on his long career, but noted with faux-cheeriness that “Herbie made millions, Bill and I made hundreds!”
“Watermelon Man” was the tune we’d all been waiting for, and Summers’ whistling intro gave me chills. The song was even looser than on the record, refined as the result of decades of practice. A groove in the purest sense.
Nothing could top that, but the band did play a few more songs, including Wayne Shorter’s “ESP,” a taste of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You,” and a solo bass rendition of “Amazing Grace.”
Summers noted that bassist Frank Russell was a Chicago local who had agreed to the gig that morning when Chris Severin got stuck in New Orleans’ “smogageddon.” Russell was clearly touched by the praise and the applause. “I’ve been playing along to these guys since I was 16,” he said. “I’m 67 now.” When the lights came up, Summers and Clark lingered to shake hands, sign LPs, and offer advice to eager young jazzheads.
The Headhunters have several shows this spring in Summers’ home of New Orleans, and they will perform at clubs and jazz festivals throughout the country this summer. I spoke to Summers over the phone one evening a few days before the Evanston show. The conversation felt like office hours with a beloved professor, one who just happened to play on some of the funkiest tracks ever committed to wax.
How did you decide to get the Headhunters back into the studio and touring post-pandemic?
Bill Summers: We started recording a couple of years after we got with Mr. Hancock. Of course we stayed close to Herbie because, you know, it was a lot of fun. It opened the world up to us and we enjoyed playing together. Paul Jackson, Michael Clark.
Harvey [Mason] was there in the beginning but he didn’t want to go on the road. He was not interested in leaving L.A. because he was a very sought-after session musician. His abilities, his sight-reading was superb. I was in the orchestra pit with him a couple of times. He could play five different drummers’ parts, and he’d have charts shooting about the pit. When it came time to play timpani, he was there. When it came time to play bells or glockenspiel, he was there. He was amazing. Movie sessions were going on constantly, you may get three or four calls a day. If you leave L.A. and you’re doing sessions, you lose your spot right away. I did a lot of sessions in L.A. also, but I was more interested in seeing the world.
On the studio side of things I’ve heard this to be true but I’ve never had it confirmed. The example you gave, where you’re playing not just a drum kit, but also playing a timpani, or all these things that Harvey gets pulled in to do, are you getting a greater fee for adding additional instruments to the session?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. You know, I made a living off of doing sessions. And although I was a touring musician, I got a lot of work in the studio, quite a bit. To give you an example, I’ve worked with Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy, Miles, Sonny Rollins, people like Sting, Carlos Santana and Herbie, of course, Quincy Jones. I mean, just the ladies I played with: Aretha, Diane Reeves, Anita Baker, Alice Coltrane, Aliki Chrysochou, the list goes on, just wonderful. I got a chance to do some things with some major people like Michael Jackson and Stanley Clark, Sonny Rollins and McCoyTyner, Freddie Hubbard. I think on this thing they call Discogs I have maybe 800 credits. Yeah, so that makes life a little more palatable.
Did you feel like you had to maintain a balance between being out on the road with groups and then being available for these studio sessions?
Bill Summers: Not really because I’m in a specialty area. There are very, very few percussionists who have ever had a record deal. You have people that do, of course, in the Latin community, there are many. Brazilian, Cuban, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, they have their own style of music, which I’ve studied also. I’m an ethnomusicologist. I write stuff that gets published.
Some people don’t like me to say this, but I consider percussionists the N word of the entertainment industry. You’re the last hired and first one fired.
I’m sure that’s a frustrating thing to come up against as you’re starting your career, to have to deal with that expendability.
Bill Summers: I didn’t have to deal with it because I started my professional career before I met Herbie, but when I joined that band, it just kind of stamped your validity. You can’t get with a Herbie Hancock, bro, unless you’re…you can’t! He’s the best musician I’ve ever met. I’ve played in Joe Zawinul’s band and he ain’t no joke, he was no joke at all. I love Joe Zawinul and I played with Joe Sample, another session musician in L.A. So there are a few of us that have been given the opportunity to reap benefits from being a known percussionist. I’m thankful.
You mentioned some of the more academic work you’ve done. I read about Anya, a fraternity you’re a part of. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly, “Aña”?
Bill Summers: “AnYA.”
Thank you. Can you tell me more about how you first got involved and what that group has meant to you over the years?
Bill Summers: Of course I can. Are you familiar with I Love Lucy? There was a word that Ricky Ricardo used a lot, it was “Babalú.” I’ll translate it for you. It is a Lukumi word, it’s super basic. Baba means father, Olu means chief or owner. And there’s a part they leave out; Aye, Babalu Aye, and that means father, chief of the world. This is an African saint, for lack of a better word, an Orisha. I found out that there were some drums associated with it called batá. I became obsessed with these drums and playing another instrument called shekere, a gourd with a bead net around it. I went to New York with a friend named Richard Pablo Landrum and he took me to a ceremony. I said, “Well, I ain’t never heard of anything like this.” I’ve studied classical piano for 10 years in the conservatory. So I was trying to figure this music out, and I could tell right away they weren’t just jamming at all.
So I found out later that there was a fraternity. You had to have your hands baptized in this fraternity in order to even touch the sacred drums. So I went through that process with a couple of people. A guy named “Puntilla”, Orlando Rios, one of the best drummers to ever come out of Cuba. And then my godfather was a guy named “Cha Cha” from Matanzas, Cuba. And when I met him, he adopted me and I would visit him. He said, “You need to have Anya.” So I became a member of his family and he initiated me to his Anya drums, which were amongst the oldest in Cuba. And he taught me how to play his style. There’s two distinct styles; Matanzas style and Havana style, so I learned both of them.
But even as a Black American, you can’t just jump in there and be the new sheriff in town. You have to pay your dues, man. The drums also represent the family. And this was a very serious thing to take away from Black people who were from Africa, who came here, not as slaves, but as persons. In the so-called “New World”, there are only two African fraternities that survive that transatlantic journey. Anya is one of them. That’s something that my people contributed to music and to the world. It’s a very sacred thing. You have to go through a lot of training and you have to commit over 300 rhythms to memory.
How long of a process was that initiation for you?
Bill Summers: There is no end to it. You could never learn it all. It’s incredible.
So it’s closer to a religious practice of prayer, it’s part of a routine.
Bill Summers: The drums actually pray. Don’t consider it anything like drums in America. If you listen to R&B music, you hear the essence of it, because those are sacred rhythms that we play and it’s kind of hard to copy it if you’re not from that culture. It has nothing to do with race. It’s more about being submerged in this funk. Some of the rhythms are suites of music that have intricate language and it’s a very difficult thing to master. I have people that were masters to me but they never wore that on their shoulder, like braids of a general. They just function. These people know how to use natural things to make life better. So there it is. I don’t call it a religion, it’s a way of life. I play batá every day.
I’m interested when you say that it’s a language, because it’s the opposite of Western notation, right? These are rhythms you’re learning purely from being passed down through the oral tradition.
Bill Summers: They’re orally passed down. But let me say something. Members of academia, they could use these notations. I’ve written many of these rhythms out, I have a book that I self published, it’s called Studies in Batá. It’s about 350 pages of information.
But I’ve never seen anyone at a ceremony read music, okay? I’ve never seen it in my life, and I’m 76, so I don’t think I’ll ever see it. So many Eurocentric musicians have put out works about Batá. So, as an African descendant, since I was in this fraternity, I felt it necessary to go to my godfather and ask him if could I have permission to write the rhythms down, so I did it and I did it twice. I did it in Matanzas, I did it in Havana, so I have both styles. It’s a very sacred position to hold, to have someone like my godfather give me the sanction. I’m not Cuban, I don’t want to be Cuban, I just want to be me.
The music is…I mean, I can time travel, I can actually time travel playing this music. They say people become “possesed,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. The culture has been bastardized and it’s been misrepresented, and people are afraid of the unknown and all kinds of knowledge. I know one thing, Jesus touched the water and it turned to wine. Anything is possible, you know? I can’t say enough about it. I just live. It’s a very clean type of thing. It’s not involve me sticking pins and bringing evil to somebody. That’s all a bunch of propaganda. I mean, it’s so crazy. I know more white guys that are becoming priests than Black.
How has it been for you being on the other side of it now with experience? Have you felt like you are also watching out for young players?
Bill Summers: Of course. Yeah, you have to. That’s part of it. For instance, I have my own temple, my own house. So I have to do ceremonies. People come to me for readings, or for elekes, which are beads that people wear. It’s not for everyone. The only thing I can do is say, thank God that I could touch Africa and be free. Thank God that I’m not brainwashed and that I’m not afraid of my people and my past and future. It’s a state of mind, man, it knows no race. You just do what’s right, period, that’s it. It’s a very beautiful thing. At a ceremony, grandma is there, grandpa is there, tío, tia, sobrinos, nephews, and the food is magnificent. Given the typical ceremony, there’s arroz con pollo, moros, which is beans and rice cooked together, plantinos, some yuca, different pasteles or candy, caramelos. Everybody is having big fun. I like that. I like that combination, I just do.
How did you first get connected with some of the newer players that you’re now touring with?
Bill Summers: I’m living in New Orleans. There’s no way you could be a professional musician and not see Chris Severin or Kyle Roussel or Shea Pierre. Donald Harrison is a jazz master. I haven’t really heard anyone like Donald on his level. He’s on the Charlie Parker level. And he’s a very astute professor of music. He knows everything there is to know about New Orleans and music. And he’s the legitimate big chief of the Congo nation. So they’re really playing Black American music and, of course, there is Native American influence in it. My grandmother looks like a full blown Cherokee. “Indians,” I don’t know, Columbus was kind of stupid. The real reason that they even used the word Indian is because he thought he was in India. It wasn’t because they were Indian tribes, no. It was some incorrect information from someone who got here by accident who ran into a rock. “I discovered…” You didn’t discover something, someone lived there. “Well, we got here, and this is now a possession of the Queen of England and…” whatever. What kind of cracker bullshit is that? Come on, man, let’s be serious.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
Harvey [Mason] was there in the beginning but he didn’t want to go on the road. He was not interested in leaving L.A. because he was a very sought-after session musician. His abilities, his sight-reading was superb. I was in the orchestra pit with him a couple of times. He could play five different drummers’ parts, and he’d have charts shooting about the pit. When it came time to play timpani, he was there. When it came time to play bells or glockenspiel, he was there. He was amazing. Movie sessions were going on constantly, you may get three or four calls a day. If you leave L.A. and you’re doing sessions, you lose your spot right away. I did a lot of sessions in L.A. also, but I was more interested in seeing the world.
On the studio side of things I’ve heard this to be true but I’ve never had it confirmed. The example you gave, where you’re playing not just a drum kit, but also playing a timpani, or all these things that Harvey gets pulled in to do, are you getting a greater fee for adding additional instruments to the session?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. You know, I made a living off of doing sessions. And although I was a touring musician, I got a lot of work in the studio, quite a bit. To give you an example, I’ve worked with Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy, Miles, Sonny Rollins, people like Sting, Carlos Santana and Herbie, of course, Quincy Jones. I mean, just the ladies I played with: Aretha, Diane Reeves, Anita Baker, Alice Coltrane, Aliki Chrysochou, the list goes on, just wonderful. I got a chance to do some things with some major people like Michael Jackson and Stanley Clark, Sonny Rollins and McCoyTyner, Freddie Hubbard. I think on this thing they call Discogs I have maybe 800 credits. Yeah, so that makes life a little more palatable.
Did you feel like you had to maintain a balance between being out on the road with groups and then being available for these studio sessions?
Bill Summers: Not really because I’m in a specialty area. There are very, very few percussionists who have ever had a record deal. You have people that do, of course, in the Latin community, there are many. Brazilian, Cuban, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, they have their own style of music, which I’ve studied also. I’m an ethnomusicologist. I write stuff that gets published.
Some people don’t like me to say this, but I consider percussionists the N word of the entertainment industry. You’re the last hired and first one fired.
I’m sure that’s a frustrating thing to come up against as you’re starting your career, to have to deal with that expendability.
Bill Summers: I didn’t have to deal with it because I started my professional career before I met Herbie, but when I joined that band, it just kind of stamped your validity. You can’t get with a Herbie Hancock, bro, unless you’re…you can’t! He’s the best musician I’ve ever met. I’ve played in Joe Zawinul’s band and he ain’t no joke, he was no joke at all. I love Joe Zawinul and I played with Joe Sample, another session musician in L.A. So there are a few of us that have been given the opportunity to reap benefits from being a known percussionist. I’m thankful.
You mentioned some of the more academic work you’ve done. I read about Anya, a fraternity you’re a part of. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly, “Aña”?
Bill Summers: “AnYA.”
Thank you. Can you tell me more about how you first got involved and what that group has meant to you over the years?
Bill Summers: Of course I can. Are you familiar with I Love Lucy? There was a word that Ricky Ricardo used a lot, it was “Babalú.” I’ll translate it for you. It is a Lukumi word, it’s super basic. Baba means father, Olu means chief or owner. And there’s a part they leave out; Aye, Babalu Aye, and that means father, chief of the world. This is an African saint, for lack of a better word, an Orisha. I found out that there were some drums associated with it called batá. I became obsessed with these drums and playing another instrument called shekere, a gourd with a bead net around it. I went to New York with a friend named Richard Pablo Landrum and he took me to a ceremony. I said, “Well, I ain’t never heard of anything like this.” I’ve studied classical piano for 10 years in the conservatory. So I was trying to figure this music out, and I could tell right away they weren’t just jamming at all.
So I found out later that there was a fraternity. You had to have your hands baptized in this fraternity in order to even touch the sacred drums. So I went through that process with a couple of people. A guy named “Puntilla”, Orlando Rios, one of the best drummers to ever come out of Cuba. And then my godfather was a guy named “Cha Cha” from Matanzas, Cuba. And when I met him, he adopted me and I would visit him. He said, “You need to have Anya.” So I became a member of his family and he initiated me to his Anya drums, which were amongst the oldest in Cuba. And he taught me how to play his style. There’s two distinct styles; Matanzas style and Havana style, so I learned both of them.
But even as a Black American, you can’t just jump in there and be the new sheriff in town. You have to pay your dues, man. The drums also represent the family. And this was a very serious thing to take away from Black people who were from Africa, who came here, not as slaves, but as persons. In the so-called “New World”, there are only two African fraternities that survive that transatlantic journey. Anya is one of them. That’s something that my people contributed to music and to the world. It’s a very sacred thing. You have to go through a lot of training and you have to commit over 300 rhythms to memory.
How long of a process was that initiation for you?
Bill Summers: There is no end to it. You could never learn it all. It’s incredible.
So it’s closer to a religious practice of prayer, it’s part of a routine.
Bill Summers: The drums actually pray. Don’t consider it anything like drums in America. If you listen to R&B music, you hear the essence of it, because those are sacred rhythms that we play and it’s kind of hard to copy it if you’re not from that culture. It has nothing to do with race. It’s more about being submerged in this funk. Some of the rhythms are suites of music that have intricate language and it’s a very difficult thing to master. I have people that were masters to me but they never wore that on their shoulder, like braids of a general. They just function. These people know how to use natural things to make life better. So there it is. I don’t call it a religion, it’s a way of life. I play batá every day.
I’m interested when you say that it’s a language, because it’s the opposite of Western notation, right? These are rhythms you’re learning purely from being passed down through the oral tradition.
Bill Summers: They’re orally passed down. But let me say something. Members of academia, they could use these notations. I’ve written many of these rhythms out, I have a book that I self published, it’s called Studies in Batá. It’s about 350 pages of information.
But I’ve never seen anyone at a ceremony read music, okay? I’ve never seen it in my life, and I’m 76, so I don’t think I’ll ever see it. So many Eurocentric musicians have put out works about Batá. So, as an African descendant, since I was in this fraternity, I felt it necessary to go to my godfather and ask him if could I have permission to write the rhythms down, so I did it and I did it twice. I did it in Matanzas, I did it in Havana, so I have both styles. It’s a very sacred position to hold, to have someone like my godfather give me the sanction. I’m not Cuban, I don’t want to be Cuban, I just want to be me.
The music is…I mean, I can time travel, I can actually time travel playing this music. They say people become “possesed,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. The culture has been bastardized and it’s been misrepresented, and people are afraid of the unknown and all kinds of knowledge. I know one thing, Jesus touched the water and it turned to wine. Anything is possible, you know? I can’t say enough about it. I just live. It’s a very clean type of thing. It’s not involve me sticking pins and bringing evil to somebody. That’s all a bunch of propaganda. I mean, it’s so crazy. I know more white guys that are becoming priests than Black.
How has it been for you being on the other side of it now with experience? Have you felt like you are also watching out for young players?
Bill Summers: Of course. Yeah, you have to. That’s part of it. For instance, I have my own temple, my own house. So I have to do ceremonies. People come to me for readings, or for elekes, which are beads that people wear. It’s not for everyone. The only thing I can do is say, thank God that I could touch Africa and be free. Thank God that I’m not brainwashed and that I’m not afraid of my people and my past and future. It’s a state of mind, man, it knows no race. You just do what’s right, period, that’s it. It’s a very beautiful thing. At a ceremony, grandma is there, grandpa is there, tío, tia, sobrinos, nephews, and the food is magnificent. Given the typical ceremony, there’s arroz con pollo, moros, which is beans and rice cooked together, plantinos, some yuca, different pasteles or candy, caramelos. Everybody is having big fun. I like that. I like that combination, I just do.
How did you first get connected with some of the newer players that you’re now touring with?
Bill Summers: I’m living in New Orleans. There’s no way you could be a professional musician and not see Chris Severin or Kyle Roussel or Shea Pierre. Donald Harrison is a jazz master. I haven’t really heard anyone like Donald on his level. He’s on the Charlie Parker level. And he’s a very astute professor of music. He knows everything there is to know about New Orleans and music. And he’s the legitimate big chief of the Congo nation. So they’re really playing Black American music and, of course, there is Native American influence in it. My grandmother looks like a full blown Cherokee. “Indians,” I don’t know, Columbus was kind of stupid. The real reason that they even used the word Indian is because he thought he was in India. It wasn’t because they were Indian tribes, no. It was some incorrect information from someone who got here by accident who ran into a rock. “I discovered…” You didn’t discover something, someone lived there. “Well, we got here, and this is now a possession of the Queen of England and…” whatever. What kind of cracker bullshit is that? Come on, man, let’s be serious.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
Did you feel like you had to maintain a balance between being out on the road with groups and then being available for these studio sessions?
Bill Summers: Not really because I’m in a specialty area. There are very, very few percussionists who have ever had a record deal. You have people that do, of course, in the Latin community, there are many. Brazilian, Cuban, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, they have their own style of music, which I’ve studied also. I’m an ethnomusicologist. I write stuff that gets published.
Some people don’t like me to say this, but I consider percussionists the N word of the entertainment industry. You’re the last hired and first one fired.
I’m sure that’s a frustrating thing to come up against as you’re starting your career, to have to deal with that expendability.
Bill Summers: I didn’t have to deal with it because I started my professional career before I met Herbie, but when I joined that band, it just kind of stamped your validity. You can’t get with a Herbie Hancock, bro, unless you’re…you can’t! He’s the best musician I’ve ever met. I’ve played in Joe Zawinul’s band and he ain’t no joke, he was no joke at all. I love Joe Zawinul and I played with Joe Sample, another session musician in L.A. So there are a few of us that have been given the opportunity to reap benefits from being a known percussionist. I’m thankful.
You mentioned some of the more academic work you’ve done. I read about Anya, a fraternity you’re a part of. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly, “Aña”?
Bill Summers: “AnYA.”
Thank you. Can you tell me more about how you first got involved and what that group has meant to you over the years?
Bill Summers: Of course I can. Are you familiar with I Love Lucy? There was a word that Ricky Ricardo used a lot, it was “Babalú.” I’ll translate it for you. It is a Lukumi word, it’s super basic. Baba means father, Olu means chief or owner. And there’s a part they leave out; Aye, Babalu Aye, and that means father, chief of the world. This is an African saint, for lack of a better word, an Orisha. I found out that there were some drums associated with it called batá. I became obsessed with these drums and playing another instrument called shekere, a gourd with a bead net around it. I went to New York with a friend named Richard Pablo Landrum and he took me to a ceremony. I said, “Well, I ain’t never heard of anything like this.” I’ve studied classical piano for 10 years in the conservatory. So I was trying to figure this music out, and I could tell right away they weren’t just jamming at all.
So I found out later that there was a fraternity. You had to have your hands baptized in this fraternity in order to even touch the sacred drums. So I went through that process with a couple of people. A guy named “Puntilla”, Orlando Rios, one of the best drummers to ever come out of Cuba. And then my godfather was a guy named “Cha Cha” from Matanzas, Cuba. And when I met him, he adopted me and I would visit him. He said, “You need to have Anya.” So I became a member of his family and he initiated me to his Anya drums, which were amongst the oldest in Cuba. And he taught me how to play his style. There’s two distinct styles; Matanzas style and Havana style, so I learned both of them.
But even as a Black American, you can’t just jump in there and be the new sheriff in town. You have to pay your dues, man. The drums also represent the family. And this was a very serious thing to take away from Black people who were from Africa, who came here, not as slaves, but as persons. In the so-called “New World”, there are only two African fraternities that survive that transatlantic journey. Anya is one of them. That’s something that my people contributed to music and to the world. It’s a very sacred thing. You have to go through a lot of training and you have to commit over 300 rhythms to memory.
How long of a process was that initiation for you?
Bill Summers: There is no end to it. You could never learn it all. It’s incredible.
So it’s closer to a religious practice of prayer, it’s part of a routine.
Bill Summers: The drums actually pray. Don’t consider it anything like drums in America. If you listen to R&B music, you hear the essence of it, because those are sacred rhythms that we play and it’s kind of hard to copy it if you’re not from that culture. It has nothing to do with race. It’s more about being submerged in this funk. Some of the rhythms are suites of music that have intricate language and it’s a very difficult thing to master. I have people that were masters to me but they never wore that on their shoulder, like braids of a general. They just function. These people know how to use natural things to make life better. So there it is. I don’t call it a religion, it’s a way of life. I play batá every day.
I’m interested when you say that it’s a language, because it’s the opposite of Western notation, right? These are rhythms you’re learning purely from being passed down through the oral tradition.
Bill Summers: They’re orally passed down. But let me say something. Members of academia, they could use these notations. I’ve written many of these rhythms out, I have a book that I self published, it’s called Studies in Batá. It’s about 350 pages of information.
But I’ve never seen anyone at a ceremony read music, okay? I’ve never seen it in my life, and I’m 76, so I don’t think I’ll ever see it. So many Eurocentric musicians have put out works about Batá. So, as an African descendant, since I was in this fraternity, I felt it necessary to go to my godfather and ask him if could I have permission to write the rhythms down, so I did it and I did it twice. I did it in Matanzas, I did it in Havana, so I have both styles. It’s a very sacred position to hold, to have someone like my godfather give me the sanction. I’m not Cuban, I don’t want to be Cuban, I just want to be me.
The music is…I mean, I can time travel, I can actually time travel playing this music. They say people become “possesed,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. The culture has been bastardized and it’s been misrepresented, and people are afraid of the unknown and all kinds of knowledge. I know one thing, Jesus touched the water and it turned to wine. Anything is possible, you know? I can’t say enough about it. I just live. It’s a very clean type of thing. It’s not involve me sticking pins and bringing evil to somebody. That’s all a bunch of propaganda. I mean, it’s so crazy. I know more white guys that are becoming priests than Black.
How has it been for you being on the other side of it now with experience? Have you felt like you are also watching out for young players?
Bill Summers: Of course. Yeah, you have to. That’s part of it. For instance, I have my own temple, my own house. So I have to do ceremonies. People come to me for readings, or for elekes, which are beads that people wear. It’s not for everyone. The only thing I can do is say, thank God that I could touch Africa and be free. Thank God that I’m not brainwashed and that I’m not afraid of my people and my past and future. It’s a state of mind, man, it knows no race. You just do what’s right, period, that’s it. It’s a very beautiful thing. At a ceremony, grandma is there, grandpa is there, tío, tia, sobrinos, nephews, and the food is magnificent. Given the typical ceremony, there’s arroz con pollo, moros, which is beans and rice cooked together, plantinos, some yuca, different pasteles or candy, caramelos. Everybody is having big fun. I like that. I like that combination, I just do.
How did you first get connected with some of the newer players that you’re now touring with?
Bill Summers: I’m living in New Orleans. There’s no way you could be a professional musician and not see Chris Severin or Kyle Roussel or Shea Pierre. Donald Harrison is a jazz master. I haven’t really heard anyone like Donald on his level. He’s on the Charlie Parker level. And he’s a very astute professor of music. He knows everything there is to know about New Orleans and music. And he’s the legitimate big chief of the Congo nation. So they’re really playing Black American music and, of course, there is Native American influence in it. My grandmother looks like a full blown Cherokee. “Indians,” I don’t know, Columbus was kind of stupid. The real reason that they even used the word Indian is because he thought he was in India. It wasn’t because they were Indian tribes, no. It was some incorrect information from someone who got here by accident who ran into a rock. “I discovered…” You didn’t discover something, someone lived there. “Well, we got here, and this is now a possession of the Queen of England and…” whatever. What kind of cracker bullshit is that? Come on, man, let’s be serious.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
Some people don’t like me to say this, but I consider percussionists the N word of the entertainment industry. You’re the last hired and first one fired.
I’m sure that’s a frustrating thing to come up against as you’re starting your career, to have to deal with that expendability.
Bill Summers: I didn’t have to deal with it because I started my professional career before I met Herbie, but when I joined that band, it just kind of stamped your validity. You can’t get with a Herbie Hancock, bro, unless you’re…you can’t! He’s the best musician I’ve ever met. I’ve played in Joe Zawinul’s band and he ain’t no joke, he was no joke at all. I love Joe Zawinul and I played with Joe Sample, another session musician in L.A. So there are a few of us that have been given the opportunity to reap benefits from being a known percussionist. I’m thankful.
You mentioned some of the more academic work you’ve done. I read about Anya, a fraternity you’re a part of. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly, “Aña”?
Bill Summers: “AnYA.”
Thank you. Can you tell me more about how you first got involved and what that group has meant to you over the years?
Bill Summers: Of course I can. Are you familiar with I Love Lucy? There was a word that Ricky Ricardo used a lot, it was “Babalú.” I’ll translate it for you. It is a Lukumi word, it’s super basic. Baba means father, Olu means chief or owner. And there’s a part they leave out; Aye, Babalu Aye, and that means father, chief of the world. This is an African saint, for lack of a better word, an Orisha. I found out that there were some drums associated with it called batá. I became obsessed with these drums and playing another instrument called shekere, a gourd with a bead net around it. I went to New York with a friend named Richard Pablo Landrum and he took me to a ceremony. I said, “Well, I ain’t never heard of anything like this.” I’ve studied classical piano for 10 years in the conservatory. So I was trying to figure this music out, and I could tell right away they weren’t just jamming at all.
So I found out later that there was a fraternity. You had to have your hands baptized in this fraternity in order to even touch the sacred drums. So I went through that process with a couple of people. A guy named “Puntilla”, Orlando Rios, one of the best drummers to ever come out of Cuba. And then my godfather was a guy named “Cha Cha” from Matanzas, Cuba. And when I met him, he adopted me and I would visit him. He said, “You need to have Anya.” So I became a member of his family and he initiated me to his Anya drums, which were amongst the oldest in Cuba. And he taught me how to play his style. There’s two distinct styles; Matanzas style and Havana style, so I learned both of them.
But even as a Black American, you can’t just jump in there and be the new sheriff in town. You have to pay your dues, man. The drums also represent the family. And this was a very serious thing to take away from Black people who were from Africa, who came here, not as slaves, but as persons. In the so-called “New World”, there are only two African fraternities that survive that transatlantic journey. Anya is one of them. That’s something that my people contributed to music and to the world. It’s a very sacred thing. You have to go through a lot of training and you have to commit over 300 rhythms to memory.
How long of a process was that initiation for you?
Bill Summers: There is no end to it. You could never learn it all. It’s incredible.
So it’s closer to a religious practice of prayer, it’s part of a routine.
Bill Summers: The drums actually pray. Don’t consider it anything like drums in America. If you listen to R&B music, you hear the essence of it, because those are sacred rhythms that we play and it’s kind of hard to copy it if you’re not from that culture. It has nothing to do with race. It’s more about being submerged in this funk. Some of the rhythms are suites of music that have intricate language and it’s a very difficult thing to master. I have people that were masters to me but they never wore that on their shoulder, like braids of a general. They just function. These people know how to use natural things to make life better. So there it is. I don’t call it a religion, it’s a way of life. I play batá every day.
I’m interested when you say that it’s a language, because it’s the opposite of Western notation, right? These are rhythms you’re learning purely from being passed down through the oral tradition.
Bill Summers: They’re orally passed down. But let me say something. Members of academia, they could use these notations. I’ve written many of these rhythms out, I have a book that I self published, it’s called Studies in Batá. It’s about 350 pages of information.
But I’ve never seen anyone at a ceremony read music, okay? I’ve never seen it in my life, and I’m 76, so I don’t think I’ll ever see it. So many Eurocentric musicians have put out works about Batá. So, as an African descendant, since I was in this fraternity, I felt it necessary to go to my godfather and ask him if could I have permission to write the rhythms down, so I did it and I did it twice. I did it in Matanzas, I did it in Havana, so I have both styles. It’s a very sacred position to hold, to have someone like my godfather give me the sanction. I’m not Cuban, I don’t want to be Cuban, I just want to be me.
The music is…I mean, I can time travel, I can actually time travel playing this music. They say people become “possesed,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. The culture has been bastardized and it’s been misrepresented, and people are afraid of the unknown and all kinds of knowledge. I know one thing, Jesus touched the water and it turned to wine. Anything is possible, you know? I can’t say enough about it. I just live. It’s a very clean type of thing. It’s not involve me sticking pins and bringing evil to somebody. That’s all a bunch of propaganda. I mean, it’s so crazy. I know more white guys that are becoming priests than Black.
How has it been for you being on the other side of it now with experience? Have you felt like you are also watching out for young players?
Bill Summers: Of course. Yeah, you have to. That’s part of it. For instance, I have my own temple, my own house. So I have to do ceremonies. People come to me for readings, or for elekes, which are beads that people wear. It’s not for everyone. The only thing I can do is say, thank God that I could touch Africa and be free. Thank God that I’m not brainwashed and that I’m not afraid of my people and my past and future. It’s a state of mind, man, it knows no race. You just do what’s right, period, that’s it. It’s a very beautiful thing. At a ceremony, grandma is there, grandpa is there, tío, tia, sobrinos, nephews, and the food is magnificent. Given the typical ceremony, there’s arroz con pollo, moros, which is beans and rice cooked together, plantinos, some yuca, different pasteles or candy, caramelos. Everybody is having big fun. I like that. I like that combination, I just do.
How did you first get connected with some of the newer players that you’re now touring with?
Bill Summers: I’m living in New Orleans. There’s no way you could be a professional musician and not see Chris Severin or Kyle Roussel or Shea Pierre. Donald Harrison is a jazz master. I haven’t really heard anyone like Donald on his level. He’s on the Charlie Parker level. And he’s a very astute professor of music. He knows everything there is to know about New Orleans and music. And he’s the legitimate big chief of the Congo nation. So they’re really playing Black American music and, of course, there is Native American influence in it. My grandmother looks like a full blown Cherokee. “Indians,” I don’t know, Columbus was kind of stupid. The real reason that they even used the word Indian is because he thought he was in India. It wasn’t because they were Indian tribes, no. It was some incorrect information from someone who got here by accident who ran into a rock. “I discovered…” You didn’t discover something, someone lived there. “Well, we got here, and this is now a possession of the Queen of England and…” whatever. What kind of cracker bullshit is that? Come on, man, let’s be serious.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
You mentioned some of the more academic work you’ve done. I read about Anya, a fraternity you’re a part of. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly, “Aña”?
Bill Summers: “AnYA.”
Thank you. Can you tell me more about how you first got involved and what that group has meant to you over the years?
Bill Summers: Of course I can. Are you familiar with I Love Lucy? There was a word that Ricky Ricardo used a lot, it was “Babalú.” I’ll translate it for you. It is a Lukumi word, it’s super basic. Baba means father, Olu means chief or owner. And there’s a part they leave out; Aye, Babalu Aye, and that means father, chief of the world. This is an African saint, for lack of a better word, an Orisha. I found out that there were some drums associated with it called batá. I became obsessed with these drums and playing another instrument called shekere, a gourd with a bead net around it. I went to New York with a friend named Richard Pablo Landrum and he took me to a ceremony. I said, “Well, I ain’t never heard of anything like this.” I’ve studied classical piano for 10 years in the conservatory. So I was trying to figure this music out, and I could tell right away they weren’t just jamming at all.
So I found out later that there was a fraternity. You had to have your hands baptized in this fraternity in order to even touch the sacred drums. So I went through that process with a couple of people. A guy named “Puntilla”, Orlando Rios, one of the best drummers to ever come out of Cuba. And then my godfather was a guy named “Cha Cha” from Matanzas, Cuba. And when I met him, he adopted me and I would visit him. He said, “You need to have Anya.” So I became a member of his family and he initiated me to his Anya drums, which were amongst the oldest in Cuba. And he taught me how to play his style. There’s two distinct styles; Matanzas style and Havana style, so I learned both of them.
But even as a Black American, you can’t just jump in there and be the new sheriff in town. You have to pay your dues, man. The drums also represent the family. And this was a very serious thing to take away from Black people who were from Africa, who came here, not as slaves, but as persons. In the so-called “New World”, there are only two African fraternities that survive that transatlantic journey. Anya is one of them. That’s something that my people contributed to music and to the world. It’s a very sacred thing. You have to go through a lot of training and you have to commit over 300 rhythms to memory.
How long of a process was that initiation for you?
Bill Summers: There is no end to it. You could never learn it all. It’s incredible.
So it’s closer to a religious practice of prayer, it’s part of a routine.
Bill Summers: The drums actually pray. Don’t consider it anything like drums in America. If you listen to R&B music, you hear the essence of it, because those are sacred rhythms that we play and it’s kind of hard to copy it if you’re not from that culture. It has nothing to do with race. It’s more about being submerged in this funk. Some of the rhythms are suites of music that have intricate language and it’s a very difficult thing to master. I have people that were masters to me but they never wore that on their shoulder, like braids of a general. They just function. These people know how to use natural things to make life better. So there it is. I don’t call it a religion, it’s a way of life. I play batá every day.
I’m interested when you say that it’s a language, because it’s the opposite of Western notation, right? These are rhythms you’re learning purely from being passed down through the oral tradition.
Bill Summers: They’re orally passed down. But let me say something. Members of academia, they could use these notations. I’ve written many of these rhythms out, I have a book that I self published, it’s called Studies in Batá. It’s about 350 pages of information.
But I’ve never seen anyone at a ceremony read music, okay? I’ve never seen it in my life, and I’m 76, so I don’t think I’ll ever see it. So many Eurocentric musicians have put out works about Batá. So, as an African descendant, since I was in this fraternity, I felt it necessary to go to my godfather and ask him if could I have permission to write the rhythms down, so I did it and I did it twice. I did it in Matanzas, I did it in Havana, so I have both styles. It’s a very sacred position to hold, to have someone like my godfather give me the sanction. I’m not Cuban, I don’t want to be Cuban, I just want to be me.
The music is…I mean, I can time travel, I can actually time travel playing this music. They say people become “possesed,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. The culture has been bastardized and it’s been misrepresented, and people are afraid of the unknown and all kinds of knowledge. I know one thing, Jesus touched the water and it turned to wine. Anything is possible, you know? I can’t say enough about it. I just live. It’s a very clean type of thing. It’s not involve me sticking pins and bringing evil to somebody. That’s all a bunch of propaganda. I mean, it’s so crazy. I know more white guys that are becoming priests than Black.
How has it been for you being on the other side of it now with experience? Have you felt like you are also watching out for young players?
Bill Summers: Of course. Yeah, you have to. That’s part of it. For instance, I have my own temple, my own house. So I have to do ceremonies. People come to me for readings, or for elekes, which are beads that people wear. It’s not for everyone. The only thing I can do is say, thank God that I could touch Africa and be free. Thank God that I’m not brainwashed and that I’m not afraid of my people and my past and future. It’s a state of mind, man, it knows no race. You just do what’s right, period, that’s it. It’s a very beautiful thing. At a ceremony, grandma is there, grandpa is there, tío, tia, sobrinos, nephews, and the food is magnificent. Given the typical ceremony, there’s arroz con pollo, moros, which is beans and rice cooked together, plantinos, some yuca, different pasteles or candy, caramelos. Everybody is having big fun. I like that. I like that combination, I just do.
How did you first get connected with some of the newer players that you’re now touring with?
Bill Summers: I’m living in New Orleans. There’s no way you could be a professional musician and not see Chris Severin or Kyle Roussel or Shea Pierre. Donald Harrison is a jazz master. I haven’t really heard anyone like Donald on his level. He’s on the Charlie Parker level. And he’s a very astute professor of music. He knows everything there is to know about New Orleans and music. And he’s the legitimate big chief of the Congo nation. So they’re really playing Black American music and, of course, there is Native American influence in it. My grandmother looks like a full blown Cherokee. “Indians,” I don’t know, Columbus was kind of stupid. The real reason that they even used the word Indian is because he thought he was in India. It wasn’t because they were Indian tribes, no. It was some incorrect information from someone who got here by accident who ran into a rock. “I discovered…” You didn’t discover something, someone lived there. “Well, we got here, and this is now a possession of the Queen of England and…” whatever. What kind of cracker bullshit is that? Come on, man, let’s be serious.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
Thank you. Can you tell me more about how you first got involved and what that group has meant to you over the years?
Bill Summers: Of course I can. Are you familiar with I Love Lucy? There was a word that Ricky Ricardo used a lot, it was “Babalú.” I’ll translate it for you. It is a Lukumi word, it’s super basic. Baba means father, Olu means chief or owner. And there’s a part they leave out; Aye, Babalu Aye, and that means father, chief of the world. This is an African saint, for lack of a better word, an Orisha. I found out that there were some drums associated with it called batá. I became obsessed with these drums and playing another instrument called shekere, a gourd with a bead net around it. I went to New York with a friend named Richard Pablo Landrum and he took me to a ceremony. I said, “Well, I ain’t never heard of anything like this.” I’ve studied classical piano for 10 years in the conservatory. So I was trying to figure this music out, and I could tell right away they weren’t just jamming at all.
So I found out later that there was a fraternity. You had to have your hands baptized in this fraternity in order to even touch the sacred drums. So I went through that process with a couple of people. A guy named “Puntilla”, Orlando Rios, one of the best drummers to ever come out of Cuba. And then my godfather was a guy named “Cha Cha” from Matanzas, Cuba. And when I met him, he adopted me and I would visit him. He said, “You need to have Anya.” So I became a member of his family and he initiated me to his Anya drums, which were amongst the oldest in Cuba. And he taught me how to play his style. There’s two distinct styles; Matanzas style and Havana style, so I learned both of them.
But even as a Black American, you can’t just jump in there and be the new sheriff in town. You have to pay your dues, man. The drums also represent the family. And this was a very serious thing to take away from Black people who were from Africa, who came here, not as slaves, but as persons. In the so-called “New World”, there are only two African fraternities that survive that transatlantic journey. Anya is one of them. That’s something that my people contributed to music and to the world. It’s a very sacred thing. You have to go through a lot of training and you have to commit over 300 rhythms to memory.
How long of a process was that initiation for you?
Bill Summers: There is no end to it. You could never learn it all. It’s incredible.
So it’s closer to a religious practice of prayer, it’s part of a routine.
Bill Summers: The drums actually pray. Don’t consider it anything like drums in America. If you listen to R&B music, you hear the essence of it, because those are sacred rhythms that we play and it’s kind of hard to copy it if you’re not from that culture. It has nothing to do with race. It’s more about being submerged in this funk. Some of the rhythms are suites of music that have intricate language and it’s a very difficult thing to master. I have people that were masters to me but they never wore that on their shoulder, like braids of a general. They just function. These people know how to use natural things to make life better. So there it is. I don’t call it a religion, it’s a way of life. I play batá every day.
I’m interested when you say that it’s a language, because it’s the opposite of Western notation, right? These are rhythms you’re learning purely from being passed down through the oral tradition.
Bill Summers: They’re orally passed down. But let me say something. Members of academia, they could use these notations. I’ve written many of these rhythms out, I have a book that I self published, it’s called Studies in Batá. It’s about 350 pages of information.
But I’ve never seen anyone at a ceremony read music, okay? I’ve never seen it in my life, and I’m 76, so I don’t think I’ll ever see it. So many Eurocentric musicians have put out works about Batá. So, as an African descendant, since I was in this fraternity, I felt it necessary to go to my godfather and ask him if could I have permission to write the rhythms down, so I did it and I did it twice. I did it in Matanzas, I did it in Havana, so I have both styles. It’s a very sacred position to hold, to have someone like my godfather give me the sanction. I’m not Cuban, I don’t want to be Cuban, I just want to be me.
The music is…I mean, I can time travel, I can actually time travel playing this music. They say people become “possesed,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. The culture has been bastardized and it’s been misrepresented, and people are afraid of the unknown and all kinds of knowledge. I know one thing, Jesus touched the water and it turned to wine. Anything is possible, you know? I can’t say enough about it. I just live. It’s a very clean type of thing. It’s not involve me sticking pins and bringing evil to somebody. That’s all a bunch of propaganda. I mean, it’s so crazy. I know more white guys that are becoming priests than Black.
How has it been for you being on the other side of it now with experience? Have you felt like you are also watching out for young players?
Bill Summers: Of course. Yeah, you have to. That’s part of it. For instance, I have my own temple, my own house. So I have to do ceremonies. People come to me for readings, or for elekes, which are beads that people wear. It’s not for everyone. The only thing I can do is say, thank God that I could touch Africa and be free. Thank God that I’m not brainwashed and that I’m not afraid of my people and my past and future. It’s a state of mind, man, it knows no race. You just do what’s right, period, that’s it. It’s a very beautiful thing. At a ceremony, grandma is there, grandpa is there, tío, tia, sobrinos, nephews, and the food is magnificent. Given the typical ceremony, there’s arroz con pollo, moros, which is beans and rice cooked together, plantinos, some yuca, different pasteles or candy, caramelos. Everybody is having big fun. I like that. I like that combination, I just do.
How did you first get connected with some of the newer players that you’re now touring with?
Bill Summers: I’m living in New Orleans. There’s no way you could be a professional musician and not see Chris Severin or Kyle Roussel or Shea Pierre. Donald Harrison is a jazz master. I haven’t really heard anyone like Donald on his level. He’s on the Charlie Parker level. And he’s a very astute professor of music. He knows everything there is to know about New Orleans and music. And he’s the legitimate big chief of the Congo nation. So they’re really playing Black American music and, of course, there is Native American influence in it. My grandmother looks like a full blown Cherokee. “Indians,” I don’t know, Columbus was kind of stupid. The real reason that they even used the word Indian is because he thought he was in India. It wasn’t because they were Indian tribes, no. It was some incorrect information from someone who got here by accident who ran into a rock. “I discovered…” You didn’t discover something, someone lived there. “Well, we got here, and this is now a possession of the Queen of England and…” whatever. What kind of cracker bullshit is that? Come on, man, let’s be serious.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
So I found out later that there was a fraternity. You had to have your hands baptized in this fraternity in order to even touch the sacred drums. So I went through that process with a couple of people. A guy named “Puntilla”, Orlando Rios, one of the best drummers to ever come out of Cuba. And then my godfather was a guy named “Cha Cha” from Matanzas, Cuba. And when I met him, he adopted me and I would visit him. He said, “You need to have Anya.” So I became a member of his family and he initiated me to his Anya drums, which were amongst the oldest in Cuba. And he taught me how to play his style. There’s two distinct styles; Matanzas style and Havana style, so I learned both of them.
But even as a Black American, you can’t just jump in there and be the new sheriff in town. You have to pay your dues, man. The drums also represent the family. And this was a very serious thing to take away from Black people who were from Africa, who came here, not as slaves, but as persons. In the so-called “New World”, there are only two African fraternities that survive that transatlantic journey. Anya is one of them. That’s something that my people contributed to music and to the world. It’s a very sacred thing. You have to go through a lot of training and you have to commit over 300 rhythms to memory.
How long of a process was that initiation for you?
Bill Summers: There is no end to it. You could never learn it all. It’s incredible.
So it’s closer to a religious practice of prayer, it’s part of a routine.
Bill Summers: The drums actually pray. Don’t consider it anything like drums in America. If you listen to R&B music, you hear the essence of it, because those are sacred rhythms that we play and it’s kind of hard to copy it if you’re not from that culture. It has nothing to do with race. It’s more about being submerged in this funk. Some of the rhythms are suites of music that have intricate language and it’s a very difficult thing to master. I have people that were masters to me but they never wore that on their shoulder, like braids of a general. They just function. These people know how to use natural things to make life better. So there it is. I don’t call it a religion, it’s a way of life. I play batá every day.
I’m interested when you say that it’s a language, because it’s the opposite of Western notation, right? These are rhythms you’re learning purely from being passed down through the oral tradition.
Bill Summers: They’re orally passed down. But let me say something. Members of academia, they could use these notations. I’ve written many of these rhythms out, I have a book that I self published, it’s called Studies in Batá. It’s about 350 pages of information.
But I’ve never seen anyone at a ceremony read music, okay? I’ve never seen it in my life, and I’m 76, so I don’t think I’ll ever see it. So many Eurocentric musicians have put out works about Batá. So, as an African descendant, since I was in this fraternity, I felt it necessary to go to my godfather and ask him if could I have permission to write the rhythms down, so I did it and I did it twice. I did it in Matanzas, I did it in Havana, so I have both styles. It’s a very sacred position to hold, to have someone like my godfather give me the sanction. I’m not Cuban, I don’t want to be Cuban, I just want to be me.
The music is…I mean, I can time travel, I can actually time travel playing this music. They say people become “possesed,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. The culture has been bastardized and it’s been misrepresented, and people are afraid of the unknown and all kinds of knowledge. I know one thing, Jesus touched the water and it turned to wine. Anything is possible, you know? I can’t say enough about it. I just live. It’s a very clean type of thing. It’s not involve me sticking pins and bringing evil to somebody. That’s all a bunch of propaganda. I mean, it’s so crazy. I know more white guys that are becoming priests than Black.
How has it been for you being on the other side of it now with experience? Have you felt like you are also watching out for young players?
Bill Summers: Of course. Yeah, you have to. That’s part of it. For instance, I have my own temple, my own house. So I have to do ceremonies. People come to me for readings, or for elekes, which are beads that people wear. It’s not for everyone. The only thing I can do is say, thank God that I could touch Africa and be free. Thank God that I’m not brainwashed and that I’m not afraid of my people and my past and future. It’s a state of mind, man, it knows no race. You just do what’s right, period, that’s it. It’s a very beautiful thing. At a ceremony, grandma is there, grandpa is there, tío, tia, sobrinos, nephews, and the food is magnificent. Given the typical ceremony, there’s arroz con pollo, moros, which is beans and rice cooked together, plantinos, some yuca, different pasteles or candy, caramelos. Everybody is having big fun. I like that. I like that combination, I just do.
How did you first get connected with some of the newer players that you’re now touring with?
Bill Summers: I’m living in New Orleans. There’s no way you could be a professional musician and not see Chris Severin or Kyle Roussel or Shea Pierre. Donald Harrison is a jazz master. I haven’t really heard anyone like Donald on his level. He’s on the Charlie Parker level. And he’s a very astute professor of music. He knows everything there is to know about New Orleans and music. And he’s the legitimate big chief of the Congo nation. So they’re really playing Black American music and, of course, there is Native American influence in it. My grandmother looks like a full blown Cherokee. “Indians,” I don’t know, Columbus was kind of stupid. The real reason that they even used the word Indian is because he thought he was in India. It wasn’t because they were Indian tribes, no. It was some incorrect information from someone who got here by accident who ran into a rock. “I discovered…” You didn’t discover something, someone lived there. “Well, we got here, and this is now a possession of the Queen of England and…” whatever. What kind of cracker bullshit is that? Come on, man, let’s be serious.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
So it’s closer to a religious practice of prayer, it’s part of a routine.
Bill Summers: The drums actually pray. Don’t consider it anything like drums in America. If you listen to R&B music, you hear the essence of it, because those are sacred rhythms that we play and it’s kind of hard to copy it if you’re not from that culture. It has nothing to do with race. It’s more about being submerged in this funk. Some of the rhythms are suites of music that have intricate language and it’s a very difficult thing to master. I have people that were masters to me but they never wore that on their shoulder, like braids of a general. They just function. These people know how to use natural things to make life better. So there it is. I don’t call it a religion, it’s a way of life. I play batá every day.
I’m interested when you say that it’s a language, because it’s the opposite of Western notation, right? These are rhythms you’re learning purely from being passed down through the oral tradition.
Bill Summers: They’re orally passed down. But let me say something. Members of academia, they could use these notations. I’ve written many of these rhythms out, I have a book that I self published, it’s called Studies in Batá. It’s about 350 pages of information.
But I’ve never seen anyone at a ceremony read music, okay? I’ve never seen it in my life, and I’m 76, so I don’t think I’ll ever see it. So many Eurocentric musicians have put out works about Batá. So, as an African descendant, since I was in this fraternity, I felt it necessary to go to my godfather and ask him if could I have permission to write the rhythms down, so I did it and I did it twice. I did it in Matanzas, I did it in Havana, so I have both styles. It’s a very sacred position to hold, to have someone like my godfather give me the sanction. I’m not Cuban, I don’t want to be Cuban, I just want to be me.
The music is…I mean, I can time travel, I can actually time travel playing this music. They say people become “possesed,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. The culture has been bastardized and it’s been misrepresented, and people are afraid of the unknown and all kinds of knowledge. I know one thing, Jesus touched the water and it turned to wine. Anything is possible, you know? I can’t say enough about it. I just live. It’s a very clean type of thing. It’s not involve me sticking pins and bringing evil to somebody. That’s all a bunch of propaganda. I mean, it’s so crazy. I know more white guys that are becoming priests than Black.
How has it been for you being on the other side of it now with experience? Have you felt like you are also watching out for young players?
Bill Summers: Of course. Yeah, you have to. That’s part of it. For instance, I have my own temple, my own house. So I have to do ceremonies. People come to me for readings, or for elekes, which are beads that people wear. It’s not for everyone. The only thing I can do is say, thank God that I could touch Africa and be free. Thank God that I’m not brainwashed and that I’m not afraid of my people and my past and future. It’s a state of mind, man, it knows no race. You just do what’s right, period, that’s it. It’s a very beautiful thing. At a ceremony, grandma is there, grandpa is there, tío, tia, sobrinos, nephews, and the food is magnificent. Given the typical ceremony, there’s arroz con pollo, moros, which is beans and rice cooked together, plantinos, some yuca, different pasteles or candy, caramelos. Everybody is having big fun. I like that. I like that combination, I just do.
How did you first get connected with some of the newer players that you’re now touring with?
Bill Summers: I’m living in New Orleans. There’s no way you could be a professional musician and not see Chris Severin or Kyle Roussel or Shea Pierre. Donald Harrison is a jazz master. I haven’t really heard anyone like Donald on his level. He’s on the Charlie Parker level. And he’s a very astute professor of music. He knows everything there is to know about New Orleans and music. And he’s the legitimate big chief of the Congo nation. So they’re really playing Black American music and, of course, there is Native American influence in it. My grandmother looks like a full blown Cherokee. “Indians,” I don’t know, Columbus was kind of stupid. The real reason that they even used the word Indian is because he thought he was in India. It wasn’t because they were Indian tribes, no. It was some incorrect information from someone who got here by accident who ran into a rock. “I discovered…” You didn’t discover something, someone lived there. “Well, we got here, and this is now a possession of the Queen of England and…” whatever. What kind of cracker bullshit is that? Come on, man, let’s be serious.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
I’m interested when you say that it’s a language, because it’s the opposite of Western notation, right? These are rhythms you’re learning purely from being passed down through the oral tradition.
Bill Summers: They’re orally passed down. But let me say something. Members of academia, they could use these notations. I’ve written many of these rhythms out, I have a book that I self published, it’s called Studies in Batá. It’s about 350 pages of information.
But I’ve never seen anyone at a ceremony read music, okay? I’ve never seen it in my life, and I’m 76, so I don’t think I’ll ever see it. So many Eurocentric musicians have put out works about Batá. So, as an African descendant, since I was in this fraternity, I felt it necessary to go to my godfather and ask him if could I have permission to write the rhythms down, so I did it and I did it twice. I did it in Matanzas, I did it in Havana, so I have both styles. It’s a very sacred position to hold, to have someone like my godfather give me the sanction. I’m not Cuban, I don’t want to be Cuban, I just want to be me.
The music is…I mean, I can time travel, I can actually time travel playing this music. They say people become “possesed,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. The culture has been bastardized and it’s been misrepresented, and people are afraid of the unknown and all kinds of knowledge. I know one thing, Jesus touched the water and it turned to wine. Anything is possible, you know? I can’t say enough about it. I just live. It’s a very clean type of thing. It’s not involve me sticking pins and bringing evil to somebody. That’s all a bunch of propaganda. I mean, it’s so crazy. I know more white guys that are becoming priests than Black.
How has it been for you being on the other side of it now with experience? Have you felt like you are also watching out for young players?
Bill Summers: Of course. Yeah, you have to. That’s part of it. For instance, I have my own temple, my own house. So I have to do ceremonies. People come to me for readings, or for elekes, which are beads that people wear. It’s not for everyone. The only thing I can do is say, thank God that I could touch Africa and be free. Thank God that I’m not brainwashed and that I’m not afraid of my people and my past and future. It’s a state of mind, man, it knows no race. You just do what’s right, period, that’s it. It’s a very beautiful thing. At a ceremony, grandma is there, grandpa is there, tío, tia, sobrinos, nephews, and the food is magnificent. Given the typical ceremony, there’s arroz con pollo, moros, which is beans and rice cooked together, plantinos, some yuca, different pasteles or candy, caramelos. Everybody is having big fun. I like that. I like that combination, I just do.
How did you first get connected with some of the newer players that you’re now touring with?
Bill Summers: I’m living in New Orleans. There’s no way you could be a professional musician and not see Chris Severin or Kyle Roussel or Shea Pierre. Donald Harrison is a jazz master. I haven’t really heard anyone like Donald on his level. He’s on the Charlie Parker level. And he’s a very astute professor of music. He knows everything there is to know about New Orleans and music. And he’s the legitimate big chief of the Congo nation. So they’re really playing Black American music and, of course, there is Native American influence in it. My grandmother looks like a full blown Cherokee. “Indians,” I don’t know, Columbus was kind of stupid. The real reason that they even used the word Indian is because he thought he was in India. It wasn’t because they were Indian tribes, no. It was some incorrect information from someone who got here by accident who ran into a rock. “I discovered…” You didn’t discover something, someone lived there. “Well, we got here, and this is now a possession of the Queen of England and…” whatever. What kind of cracker bullshit is that? Come on, man, let’s be serious.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
But I’ve never seen anyone at a ceremony read music, okay? I’ve never seen it in my life, and I’m 76, so I don’t think I’ll ever see it. So many Eurocentric musicians have put out works about Batá. So, as an African descendant, since I was in this fraternity, I felt it necessary to go to my godfather and ask him if could I have permission to write the rhythms down, so I did it and I did it twice. I did it in Matanzas, I did it in Havana, so I have both styles. It’s a very sacred position to hold, to have someone like my godfather give me the sanction. I’m not Cuban, I don’t want to be Cuban, I just want to be me.
The music is…I mean, I can time travel, I can actually time travel playing this music. They say people become “possesed,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. The culture has been bastardized and it’s been misrepresented, and people are afraid of the unknown and all kinds of knowledge. I know one thing, Jesus touched the water and it turned to wine. Anything is possible, you know? I can’t say enough about it. I just live. It’s a very clean type of thing. It’s not involve me sticking pins and bringing evil to somebody. That’s all a bunch of propaganda. I mean, it’s so crazy. I know more white guys that are becoming priests than Black.
How has it been for you being on the other side of it now with experience? Have you felt like you are also watching out for young players?
Bill Summers: Of course. Yeah, you have to. That’s part of it. For instance, I have my own temple, my own house. So I have to do ceremonies. People come to me for readings, or for elekes, which are beads that people wear. It’s not for everyone. The only thing I can do is say, thank God that I could touch Africa and be free. Thank God that I’m not brainwashed and that I’m not afraid of my people and my past and future. It’s a state of mind, man, it knows no race. You just do what’s right, period, that’s it. It’s a very beautiful thing. At a ceremony, grandma is there, grandpa is there, tío, tia, sobrinos, nephews, and the food is magnificent. Given the typical ceremony, there’s arroz con pollo, moros, which is beans and rice cooked together, plantinos, some yuca, different pasteles or candy, caramelos. Everybody is having big fun. I like that. I like that combination, I just do.
How did you first get connected with some of the newer players that you’re now touring with?
Bill Summers: I’m living in New Orleans. There’s no way you could be a professional musician and not see Chris Severin or Kyle Roussel or Shea Pierre. Donald Harrison is a jazz master. I haven’t really heard anyone like Donald on his level. He’s on the Charlie Parker level. And he’s a very astute professor of music. He knows everything there is to know about New Orleans and music. And he’s the legitimate big chief of the Congo nation. So they’re really playing Black American music and, of course, there is Native American influence in it. My grandmother looks like a full blown Cherokee. “Indians,” I don’t know, Columbus was kind of stupid. The real reason that they even used the word Indian is because he thought he was in India. It wasn’t because they were Indian tribes, no. It was some incorrect information from someone who got here by accident who ran into a rock. “I discovered…” You didn’t discover something, someone lived there. “Well, we got here, and this is now a possession of the Queen of England and…” whatever. What kind of cracker bullshit is that? Come on, man, let’s be serious.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
How did you first get connected with some of the newer players that you’re now touring with?
Bill Summers: I’m living in New Orleans. There’s no way you could be a professional musician and not see Chris Severin or Kyle Roussel or Shea Pierre. Donald Harrison is a jazz master. I haven’t really heard anyone like Donald on his level. He’s on the Charlie Parker level. And he’s a very astute professor of music. He knows everything there is to know about New Orleans and music. And he’s the legitimate big chief of the Congo nation. So they’re really playing Black American music and, of course, there is Native American influence in it. My grandmother looks like a full blown Cherokee. “Indians,” I don’t know, Columbus was kind of stupid. The real reason that they even used the word Indian is because he thought he was in India. It wasn’t because they were Indian tribes, no. It was some incorrect information from someone who got here by accident who ran into a rock. “I discovered…” You didn’t discover something, someone lived there. “Well, we got here, and this is now a possession of the Queen of England and…” whatever. What kind of cracker bullshit is that? Come on, man, let’s be serious.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
The truth will be told. There’s a whole side of life and spiritualism that most of the world never sees. So when people do evil things, I don’t get mad at them. They’re misdirected and misguided. There’s just much more joy in sharing things and informing people of things. Why try to figure out how to kill as many people as possible? What kind of thinking is that? Man, I feel good. I feel really good because I don’t think like that, I’m trying to help my fellow man, I’m not trying to hurt him. Let’s share some information. You got jambalaya and I got crawfish pie. Really that’s the truth of it. One thing I learned from batá and studying from masters: there’s a world, a universe, between two notes.
The other thing is, you know, it’s much better to enjoy one another than to kill each other. I’ve had the fortune to understand what that means and I work to improve my community, young people and the universe. The planet Earth, it’s not even a dust spot in the universe. All you have to do is look up. The sky ain’t the limit, it’s just a little atmosphere that surrounds Earth. Once you get past that, you’re on your own. The queen can’t claim it, they can put all the flags they want up there, it don’t mean nothing.
Is that what keeps you in New Orleans, the combination of people from all these backgrounds and all these sounds from all over?
Bill Summers: I wouldn’t say so, my family is from here. My great-great uncle signed the Confederate Constitution. I’ve visited the plantation that my family came off of. It’s a few miles for me. I have artifacts from an archeological dig that was done on the land that my family came from. It’s the Kenner family. In fact, they have an airport here. It’s in Kenner, Louisiana, and my family owned Kenner, Louisiana. But I was on the black side of the family. There was a difference in how we were treated and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. So I’m immersed in that tradition. My main objective is to build a school right here, on the land that my people came from. There’s a lot here for me, my family has been here longer than most.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
I was actually born in Detroit. My family left during an exodus. There was a huge exodus of people from Louisiana, especially people from the River Parishes like where I’m at. My mother was born in Donaldsonville, my father was born in Darrow across the river. And there used to be a ferry boat that would take people from Darrow to Donaldsonville, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. And then it changed to Baton Rouge, which is about 25 miles away. This area is very rich in culture and industry. The Ashland plantation, where many of my family came from, had the most advanced farm systems. Most plantation owners would go to the Ashland plantation just to see how to do things. So I’m steeped in culture and I know a lot about my history.
Certainly, I appreciate you sharing it with me.
Bill Summers: I’m singing like a bird, okay? People think they know the real deal, but they don’t know. They don’t really get the real history of Louisiana. There are a lot of people that come here and buy a plantation, and then they go out and buy some old shacks and put them around there and call them slave quarters. It’s a big game, the plantation game, I call it. Recently, they found an unmarked grave and there were two thousand Black people in the grave. The Shell oil company owned the property and they immediately shut it down, and then they put a barrier around the site. None of these were marked graves. There were maybe one or two marked graves in the place.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
But I did a ceremony there for what we call egun, ancestors. And normally you do it one person at a time, but it would have taken the rest of my life to do that. So, we had one big ceremony and hundreds of people came to pray over the remains. We did that also in Mobile, Alabama. The last slave ship on record that dropped human cargo in the continental US came into Mobile Harbor, they put the human cargo on shore, and then they burnt the ship and sank it to hide the evidence. A couple of years ago, they resurrected the ship, so I and some of the sacred drummers that have gone through the proper procedures went to this place and played in the cemetery.
How large was the group for this ceremony in Alabama?
Bill Summers: Mobile, there was three of us, that’s it. Three Anya drummers. You don’t need an audience, ain’t nobody clapping for this shit. Ain’t nobody going “Yaaaay”, it’s ceremonial, that’s a whole ‘nother aspect of playing music. I play for the universe, and then I go and play in Paris, or Nefertiti, or King Albert’s Hall in London or Madison Square Garden. That’s not sacred. It is, but it ain’t. It’s a difference.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
You mentioned you traveled the world over. Are there any particular venues or cities that you visited that stand out in your memory?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course, every one of them. Hey man, look, here’s how I look at it. Paris is a room in my house. Tunisia is a room in my house. Nigeria is just a room in my house. It belongs to you, it belongs to us, it’s ours. It’s just one big-ass house with different rooms. Some of them need to be cleaned up, though. That’s how I really look at things. The Earth is not that big. I think people have got it wrong. If you look up at night, and you’re not in the city, you’re going to see a lot of stars.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
I live not too far from Lake Michigan, and if you just go out on the right night and look straight up, it’s crazy what you can see.
Bill Summers: Yeah, exactly. It’s so crowded up here, it’s ridiculous. But the nearest thing is hundreds of thousands of miles away, so how do you get there? How do you travel through the universe? You can’t do it with some machine. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna be like that ceremony I go to where you’re playing some drums that are locked into the universe, and all of a sudden, clink, clink, clink, clink, you’re traveling. Look, I was doing this today, just listening to some batá drumming on the freeway, and I’m actually not even paying attention to the traffic, I’m just floating.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
And I think that’s a very necessary thing for people to experience. To open up and to just absorb the energy of the universe itself. I couldn’t do that with classical music. I couldn’t do that with European music. I could enjoy it, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, all that was good, it’s spiritual. But at the same time, you can’t really write shit down. It’s a guide to try to recreate what Chopin did. I don’t think the music is really protected by writing it down like that. You know? I think it’s better that you have Chopin teaching little Chopin how to play the shit. And then he passes it down to the next student, to the next one. It’s more accurate.
People ask me, “How do you tune the batá?” I first make a set of drums and then I tune them to my specifications. There’s no A equals 440[hz]. The universe says, “Look, it’s going to be moist today and the drums are going to be lower.” Next week, it’ll be scalding hot, no humidity, the shits going to go up. That’s another way of tuning. You’re interpreting the universe. You can’t come with some regulations and tell people this is it.
Do you feel that force coming through other players when you’re in a group? Does it feel like you’re all in tune with the same thing?
Bill Summers: Yeah, of course. Go to the internet and look up Oro Seco on YouTube. There’s one guy named Angel Bolaños, as good a batá drummer as you can get. If you listen to it, you’ll hear it unmistakably. He’s like Bach, he’s like Charlie Parker, he’s like John Coltrane, he is like Michael Jackson. He is the cream of the crop. You can’t fake the funk.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
That’s something I have to remind myself when I’m practicing. It’s about putting the time in and getting in a room with people and making music. There’s no shortcuts.
Bill Summers: There’s no shortcuts. You could bullshit yourself into believing that you’re coming with the real deal, but someone has to recognize it. It’s funny, man. As a kid, I could tell if someone was Black or white by the way they sang. It became a little difficult with people like Bobby Caldwell or like Michael McDonald, you can’t get no funkier than that, the way he approaches the microphone. So there’s this essence that some people can get that others could never get. They could be really good and never reach that level of funky, talking funkier than funk. You can’t fake the funk, you can’t do it.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
Is that something that you’ve seen in different audiences? Are there crowds that will clap on the one and three, or that have a harder time tuning into your music at times?
Bill Summers: With batá you learn you can’t judge people on how they interpret the music. By and large, just from observation, Eurocentric people tend to clap on one and three and Afrocentric people clap on two and four. That’s something you could test for yourself. If someone wanted to play jazz, they got to go to Black. Do you know the origin of jazz, do you know what the word means?
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
I don’t know the origin of the word, no.
Bill Summers: Well, let me give you one that I believe to be true. Back in the day, when Black people played music, white people in New Orleans came up with “jackass music”. They demeaned black musicians all the time, it was a regular thing. At one point it was spelled Jass, so that’s an abbreviation of jackass. Jazz. That’s where it came from.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.
Now, some people say it came out of the brothel. Well, of course, people are going to gravitate towards the negative because they had to explain their actions. “These people ain’t human. They’re next to monkeys.” There was a guy named Ota Benga, they took this brother from Africa and put him in a zoo in Manhattan next to the monkeys. It’s a shame what they did to him. But this is part of the distortion of it all. I don’t care who you are, if you’re Eskimo or you’re white, you’re from Europe, you can’t give into that type of negativity. You can’t start looking at other people as specimens that you’re above. But the most important thing I’ve learned from being in Anya is that without the Chinese, we wouldn’t have made it. Without the Africans, it wouldn’t have happened. Without Europe, it wouldn’t happen. So why not get along? That’s the next level. If people can get past superiority and not falling for the Okie doke.
Listen, the Headhunters, we’re going to be traveling and going to Baltimore, Indiana, Detroit, blah, blah, blah. We’re not really musicians, we’re physicians. We heal people. I always say something in the beginning which is, within the first 16, 32 bars, you’re going to be screaming. And it happens every night. I feel confident in saying that it’s not ego, it’s just the command over notes that we have, to make people happier.